The PlayStation has basically become Sony’s bread and butter

It’s funny how times change. 20 years ago, the PlayStation was a skunkworks product that a renegade faction within Sony had just fought to get released. Now here we are in 2015 and Sony CEO Kaz Hirai — a former boss of the PlayStation division — has announced that the company is essentially going to stop trying to grow its consumer electronics businesses beside the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation isn’t only Sony’s last great product; it might as well be Sony’s only product. Sony is The PlayStation Company. Sony has always been the crown jewel of Japan’s once-dominant technology industry. The company made beautifully designed, highly profitable devices in just about every category imaginable, and imagined a few categories of its own. But the one invention with the potential to unify the company — the internet — proved to be its undoing. Sony botched the shift to digital music, it missed the move to smartphones and tablets, and has consistently failed to create a compelling ecosystem for its products. Now the smartphone — other companies’ smartphones, usually — has replaced almost everything it sells.